Facebook location ad gets the in-store sales reporting

Facebook has introduced the store locator last year. But that functionality is basically developed for the desktop and big screen devices. That offers a terrible experience on the small screen devices. The company has announced a new way to locate your store in the location ads especially for the mobile devices. Though people search online for the products they want, but about 90% of the purchase they made through in-store visits. That is the reason why Facebook is actively targeting offline conversions along with the online sales.

Facebook has announced the new features of the location ads on Tuesday. The company has announced the integration of the interactive map in location ads and in-store visits and sales report on an official blog post. Facebook has launched new native store locator for the location ads on mobile devices. This location carousel ad includes the map having the different store location to make an offline purchase. It will offer the call-to-action such as ‘Get Direction’. Clicking on that will show you the directions to the nearest store within the ad on the mobile device. The ad will utilize the device’s default mapping tool and offer you the additional business information like working hours, contact information, website and estimated travel time along with the direction. This feature will help more and more users to find your store and boost your in-store conversions.

Marketers usually struggle to effectively and accurately measure the impact of the Facebook advertising on the offline purchase. Facebook has introduced a new metric in the advert reporting that will help advertisers solve this problem. The new reporting metric called ‘Store Visits’ gives you the information about the users who have visits the store with the reference of your location ads. This insight will help you determine how many people visited your store after seeing your Facebook campaign and optimize the future campaigns based on that results. Facebook estimate the store visits based on the information from the users having location service enabled on their device. This metric will be available globally for every marketer in coming months.

Along with the in-store visits, Facebook also lets you measure the offline purchase now. Advertisers can connect the offline purchase and the phone call conversions to their respective ad campaign through Facebook’s new Offline Conversion API. This API matches the transaction data from the in-store customer database and advert reporting. Advertisers can also see the data in the real time classified by age and gender. It will let you see the real time results as transaction occurs. It will also give you detailed demographic insights about the users to optimize the future campaigns.

Google has started offering the same insights of the in-store visits and conversions more than a year time ago. Facebook is approaching the same tactic to drive offline conversion. Facebook has more personal information about the specific audience. Advertisers can take the advantage of that information to increase the offline sales through location advertising on Facebook.